The year isn’t even half over, and 2015 is already shaping up to be a banner year for medical technology. From cancer treatments to pain relief to robots, the new treatments of the 21st century keeps getting more awesome. For example, computers are a wonderful innovation for hospitals, but they harbor germs from every finger that touches them. So what do we do about that?
8. Holographic Keyboards
Holographic keyboards might seem like a trivial and useless technology for the medical industry, however that is far from the case. While modern hospitals aim to be as clean as humanly possible, people still wind up getting infections from germs within hospitals. Actually, around 100,000 people each year die from hospital infections, and holographic keyboards can help reduce the spread. Technologies like the HaptoMime would provide hospital staff members with a virtual screen that you can interact with, without touching it at all. These devices then would curb the spread of deadly infections.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, vanilla from Mexico was all the rage. Planters tried to get the plant to grow in other parts of the world, but while the vine grew, it would not pollinate and produce vanilla beans. Growers couldn’t even find the sexual parts of the plant, which would enable them to hand-pollinate it.
They kept trying. One plantation owner, Ferréol Bellier-Beaumont, on the island of Réunion halfway between India and Africa, had received a bunch of vanilla plants from the government in Paris. He’d planted them, and one, only one, held on for 22 years. It never fruited.
The story goes that one morning in 1841, Bellier-Beaumont was walking with his young African slave Edmond when they came up to a surviving vine. Edmond pointed to a part of the plant, and there, in plain view, were two packs of vanilla beans hanging from the vine. Two! That was startling. But then Edmond dropped a little bomb: This wasn’t an accident. He’d produced those fruits himself, he said, by hand-pollination.
The 12-year-old’s technique worked, and he taught it to other slaves of Réunion. Exports of vanilla exploded. What’s most amazing about the story is that Edmond received credit for the discovery, although his story had its ups and downs. Read about the discovery of vanilla pollination and find out what happened to Edmond at National Geographic’s Phenomena blog.
The largest Buddha statues in the world stood against the cliffs of the Bamiyan Valley in Afghanistan for centuries. Then in March of 2001, the Taliban dynamited the ancient artifacts. The holes in the cliffs that the statues were carved from remain, and in 2003, the Valley was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Buddhas cannot be rebuilt, but a couple of Chinese artists, Janson Yu and Liyan Hu, designed a system to project holograms of the statues into the holes where they once stood. The first projection took place on June 7.
The couple is currently filming a documentary and traveling around the world, but to them Bamiyan was a priority. With the government and UNESCO’s permission, the couple hoisted their projector onto scaffolding and screened images of the gargantuan Buddhas in their original homes. According to NDTV, the projector, which the couple said was valued at $120,000, was gifted to the Afghan government following the display.
Chris Pratt is riding high after the record-breaking opening of Jurassic World. After he spent months wrestling with fake dinosaurs, he’s now in PR mode to promote the film. Polish prankster Sylwester Wardęga (previously at Neatorama) took advantage of an opportunity to prank Pratt with a full-size dinosaur in a corridor!
LEGO Will built this awesome LEGO version of the “morale machine” wagon that carried drummers and the Doof Warrior in the movie Mad Max: Fury Road.
Have you seen that big drum truck with the air ducts and dozens of speakers from the Mad Max: Fury Road trailers or posters? It's the weirdest looking thing! And it's silly! But I totally get it! If you saw and/or heard this thing coming at you, you'd be terrified!
by Richard Neimi (misspelled) Political Science Department University of Rochester, Rochester, New York
In a recent issue of AIR,1 Kevin Krajick pointed out that there are many scientists whose names closely match their fields of study. In doing so he calculated the Name Number (the percentage of such people) for his field, Geology. He challenged readers to mine data bases in their own professions, remarking that “it remains to be seen” whether Name Numbers for other disciplines will out-do geology.
Having made the count for my own field, I can report that political science does not quite reach the plateau set by geology if one considers only names that refer to governmental positions or to concepts studied by the discipline. But if one adds names of holders of governmental positions—even, perhaps, limiting them to heads of countries—then political science soars past geology and may be king of the Hill.
Following the procedures usedin Krajick’s path-breaking work, I examined the 4,529 names (including those occurring more than once) appearing in the on-line index to the program for the 2005 national conference of the Midwest Political Science Association. Numbers below refer to times the name appears (numbers in parentheses are those of distinct persons):
6 King (4), 1 King Jr.; 2 Rey (1) 1 DeLeon, 1 Leon, 2 Primo (1) 2 Pope (1) 2 Prince (1), 2 Prins (1) 1 Duke 1 El Sherif 3 Khan 2 Power (1); 2 Powers 2 Guerra (but no War, and no Peace) 2 Canon (1)
A “new” species of octopus may be named Opistoteuthis adorabilis because it’s cute, although the decision is still up in the air. The tiny cephalopod from the depths of the ocean was first collected 20 years ago, but the honor of naming the species goes to the first scientist to classify and thoroughly describe it. That job went to Stephanie Bush of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.
A double murder rocked the tiny town of Odessa, Buffalo County on the night of Dec. 4, 1899. Lillian Dinsmore was found dead in the kitchen of the house in which she and her charismatic husband Frank L. Dinsmore boarded. Fred Laue, the boarding house owner was shot in his bedroom. The Dinsmores had been married only a year. According to Fred Laue's wife, Mr. Dinsmore became obsessed with her and seduced her. Unhappy in his marriage, Dinsmore supposedly plotted to kill his young wife and murder Laue. After she was murdered, Lillian Dinsmore's brothers accused Dinsmore of using hypnotic powers on their vulnerable sister. After hearing the accusation, Mrs. Laue also claimed to be a victim of Dinsmore's hypnotic influence. The Dinsmore case became a newspaper sensation. He vehemently denied all the charges even after the guilty verdict was read, and he was sentenced to death by hanging. Dinsmore's lawyers appealed the sentence and Governor Dietrich stepped in to commute his sentence to life in prison. Dinsmore posed for his mug shot at the Nebraska State Prison wearing a simple white cotton shirt, sack jacket and striped prison-issue pants.
Bert Martin was sentenced for stealing a horse in Keya Paha County. At the prison, Bert worked in the broom factory. One day, Bert's cellmate of 11 months told the prison authorities a secret: Bert was really a woman named Lena Martin. In sparsely settled Keya Paha County, Lena's masculine appearance allowed her to find work as a cowboy. Prison records show Martin was transferred to the women's division on Sept. 22, 1901. When Martin was sentenced, a woman, believed to be Martin's wife stood beside him. Martin was sentenced to two years. The Governor of Nebraska Ezra P. Savage said of her: “a sexual monstrosity, unfit for association with men or women even in a penal institution, and on the solemn promise of its aged mother to care for it and guard it, and that prison morals imperatively demanded its removal, sentence was commuted to one year, six months, Feb. 3, 1902.”
Nebraska seems like such a wholesome state, full of small towns, agricultural products, and God-fearing Americans. But, of course, there are miscreants everywhere. Mashable has a collection of 41 mugshots taken between the 1880s and the 1930s from the Nebraska State Historical Society, with the stories behind each. The crimes include pickpocketing, prostitution, theft, insurance fraud, bank robbery, mayhem, bootlegging, murder, and more.
First, you have to realize that DNA doesn’t tell the whole story of genetics or a certain species’ genome. After all, humans and chimpanzees don’t even have the same number of chromosomes. And the task of comparing human and chimp DNA is more complicated than you thought, because DNA and its sequencing are tremendously complicated. -via Geeks Are Sexy
The last two times I drove to Florida, it took two days to get there and one day to get home. That’s because I wanted to be home badly, and I was out of money for a hotel stop. I probably will never go again. But that has nothing to do with the “return trip effect.”
When you go on a road trip, does going to your destination seem to take forever? Yes, most of the time. But the trip home seems somewhat shorter, doesn’t it? This holds up even when you take the exact same route home. A recent study says that the reason behind this phenomena is that we are bad at judging or remembering how long a trip takes.
The study does support the basic “return trip effect,” but its methods and reasoning are unconvincing. The sample size was woefully small, at 20 participants. The researchers assumed we have to travel the exact same route there and back to feel the effect, which isn’t necessarily true. And their conclusion was flat: even if people recall return trips poorly, the question of why they have this particular memory failure still remains.
For a stronger theory on the “return trip effect” we (re)turn to a clever series of studies reported in a 2011 paper in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. The work was led by social psychologist Niels van de Ven of the Tilburg University in the Netherlands.
Ven and collaborators wanted to explore two possible explanations for the “return trip effect.” One was “familiarity”: just as routine tasks seem to take less effort than new ones, perhaps familiar routes seem to take less time to complete. The other was “expectations”: if the way there takes longer than we thought it would, then perhaps we adjust our time expectations upward on the way back, and find ourselves pleasantly surprised when it doesn’t take as long.
Patrick Corr has a blind calico cat named Stevie (previously at Neatorama). Yet, Stevie is fearless and never lets her disability stop her from enjoying life and the great outdoors.
The American Civil War was sparked when eleven slave states tried to secede from the Union. They failed, and they’re not the only ones. Here are some other lesser-known secessionist movements.
1. THE GREAT REPUBLIC OF ROUGH AND READY
Seceded from: The United States, in April 1850
Details: At least two reasons have been cited for why the tiny mining town of Rough and Ready, in California’s gold country, decided to secede from the Union. One was anger over the imposition of a tax on mining claims, and the other involved a man known as the “Boston Ravine Slicker,” who swindled a popular miner named Joe Swiegart out of $ 200. When a local judge refused to prosecute the Slicker on the grounds that he hadn’t actually broken any laws, Rough and Ready seceded from the United States and “the next morning rescued what was left of Joe’s money and took the Slicker to the edge of town with instructions never to return,” writes Fay Dunbar of the Nevada County Historical Society. (Another version of the story says the Slicker was hanged.)
What Happened: Whatever the case, the Great Republic of Rough and Ready voted to rejoin the Union in time to celebrate the 4th of July, perhaps hurried along by the refusal of saloons in nearby Nevada City and Grass Valley to sell liquor to Rough and Ready’s “foreign miners.”
2. THE FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATE OF SCOTT
Seceded from: Tennessee, in June 1861
Details: Tennessee was divided over whether to secede from the Union and was the last state to do so, about two months after the Civil War started. The citizens of Scott County, in northeastern Tennessee, voted against secession by the greatest margin of any county in the state. When Tennessee left the Union, the Scott County Assembly voted to leave Tennessee. A messenger was sent to Nashville to inform the state that the county was “henceforth to be known as the Free and Independent State of Scott.”
Saturday, Prince Carl Philip of Sweden married Sofia Hellqvist in Stockholm. For the recessional, Samuel Ljungblahd and the choir By Grace performed “Joyful Joyful,” in the arrangement from Sister Act 2. It seems a bit incongruous for the occasion, but it’s nice to hear while looking at the royal couple and their numerous royal relatives and guests.
YOU HAVE NOT LIVED UNTIL YOU’VE SEEN HUNDREDS OF WHITE ROYALS TRY AND CLAP TO A GOSPEL TUNE.
Watch this stunt that combines skill, trust, luck, and balls. Dutch singer David Achter de Mole was performing with his group John Coffey at the Pinkpop Festival in Landgraaf, Netherlands and went “crowdwalking” on the hands and shoulders of concertgoers. Someone throws a beer -in a cup- and he deftly catches it and drinks it like that’s nothing. Sweet! -via Tastefully Offensive
Warning: if you are very susceptible to the power of suggestion or have a touch of hypochondria, you might want to skip this video. John Green talks about medical conditions that are so weird, you’d think he was making them up. No, they are real, but most are rare or relatively inconsequential. This is the first of a three-part video series called “Summer Bummers,” which should make you feel lucky to be in as good a shape as you are. If they go a little fast for you, you can find a transcript at mental_floss.
